Beware the Stepfather

Peg (Paula Trickey - Crimes of the Mind) hadn't dated in many years but all of a sudden found herself falling Richard (William McNamara - The Wrong Student), the wealthy owner of a pawn business. Whilst Peg's youngest daughter, Lizzie (Madison Lee Brown), is happy that her mum is happy her eldest daughter, Maggie (Holly Deveaux - Deadly Attraction), is not as she finds Richard creepy and annoying, which makes things difficult when Peg accepts Richard's marriage proposal. After they all move in to Richard's fancy home things go from bad to worse for Maggie as Richard starts perving on her and then forcing himself on her, which firstly leads to her self harming and then running away. Maggie's running away forces Peg to see Richard for who he realy is but the question is who is going to find Maggie first.

After the usual opening scene, which features someone in danger, "Running Away" then takes us to a scene which sees Paula Trickey as Peg in sexy underwear as she gets dressed. I mention this purely because this is a movie where several of the female actresses are seen in lingerie or bikinis and most of the time it feels like a distraction tactic, buying some time till the real story starts to take shape. That real story involves the pervy Richard forcing himself on Maggie, first by watching her then blackmailing her and so on. It is frankly, and sadly, all pretty routine with Maggie being a bit of a bad girl anyway contributing to the problems. The thing is that there is another side to "Running Away" as Maggie discovers Richard's secrets and she happens to meet a guy at school called Chip who says he can hack which of course you can guess is going to come in useful at some point later on.

The trouble with "Running Away" is that the older characters come across as forced with no one capable of stringing a sentence together in a natural way. Whilst not the worst of these William McNamara as Richard doesn't come across as creepy he comes across as a completely over the top sleazy jerk who over emotes everything he says and does, he makes Dick Dastardly seem natural. It makes "Running Away" one of those movies which not only ends up bad but due to the over the top nature of some of the characters it is also annoying. The shame of this is that the storyline of a new stepfather acting pervy has plenty of potential but in this it is destroyed by the forced acting.

What this all boils down to is that "Running Away" is almost one of those movies which entertains but more often than not for the bad things including over the top nature of the acting. But not only is some of the acting annoying it actually takes away from the storyline which had potential for being half decent.